Moses Coulee pipe case
I WANDERED IN A GARDEN. It occupied considerable ground, surrounding the irregular bends of an old convent and changing tone and aspect around each hidden corner. Plantings tucked close to the main building were shaded by large exotic trees, and with dusk closing quickly, many of the shrubs and perennials seemed to reach beyond their natural limits. A narrow walkway skirted the sawn trunks of three huge maple trees, fronted by two irregular beds where gardeners had planted ornamental annuals. There I came upon the deep green elliptical leaves of a short nicotiana, with sprays of pleasant blossoms that opened around my shins. They carried a look that has long been popular in the Northwest; in fact, seeds from similar nicotianas were gathered alongside those of common petunias at a recent archaeological dig on the Ingles family homestead near the old Fort Vancouver fur post. It is easy to see why Mrs. Ingles would have favored the ornamental tobacco. On this nippy September evening, their trumpet flowers still bloomed in profusion, and the pale yellow and cream petals deftly captured the graying light. The delicate fragance of their night-scenting blooms mixed with the pleasant rot of garden compost to curl through the air.
A sphinx moth helicoptered over and touched two or three of the blossoms, nectaring so quickly that all I could make out was the urgent buzz of its wings and a dark bouncing shadow that zipped across the footpath and disappeared past the overgrown beds. In its wake I noticed another variety of nicotiana, this one head-high and much more robust. Beneath flowers as white as the moon, the stems grew thick and hairy, and the leaves spread larger than my outstretched hand. One touch confirmed that the green foliage was covered with sticky brown hairs, each one a gland bursting with the oil of nicotine. This was a rough-cut cultivar, one whose acrid, almost chemical smell overpowered the sweet nectar of its cousin’s blooms.
I grew up in country where tobacco was a profitable crop, at a time when smoking permeated the culture, and these stalks brought back the memory of flue-cured leaves hanging rich and golden on bare pine poles. I could see the yellow-green sprouts of the commercial fields in the Carolinas, and remember how children came crying out of them in late summer, their fingers swollen by those prickly glands of nicotine. I could smell the inside of my Uncle Mutt’s Pontiac, saturated with the noxious, sweet aroma of the perpetual cigar that lolled from one side of his mouth to the other.
AS THE THREE CARAVELS of Christopher Columbus set sail from the newly christened island of San Salvador in 1492, they were hailed by a lone boatman in a dugout canoe. The man scrambled aboard the Santa Maria for a ride to the next island, carrying with him a clump of red earth and “some dry leaves which must be something much valued by them, since they offered me some at San Salvador as a gift.” When Columbus landed in Cuba a couple of weeks later, he saw Taino people rolling similar dried leaves into long cigars and sniffing smoke from the “tobacos” through their nostrils.
The cured herb of the Tainos belonged to the genus Nicotiana, whose ancestral forms arose in South America and spread along the backbone of the American continents. Except for a few representatives in Australia and the nearby South Pacific Islands, the members of this genus grow only in the Americas, where they tend to favor rather open, semiarid country. Some of these tobacco species live as annuals, others as perennials; some hug the equator, while others flourish in high temperate latitudes. They range in size from a scraggly bush to an actual tree, with wide variations in form; they hold in common trumpet-shaped flowers and prickly hairlike glands. At some point in the distant past, humans discovered the potent pharmaceutical properties of tobacco chemistry, then learned how to propagate the plants from seed. Early travelers introduced a couple of big-leafed South American species across the Caribbean islands and up through Mexico and eastern North America. Species native to western North America were also spread along aboriginal trade routes, their tiny seeds moving from tribe to tribe, hand to hand.
Beginning with Columbus, and continuing with Cortés in Mexico, Cartier in the St. Lawrence, and Drake in California, explorers around the periphery of North America watched tribal people imbibe tobacco. When sailors carried sample plants and seeds back across the Atlantic, fashionable people in Europe began to smoke, chew, dip, snort, and sneeze themselves. French ambassador Jean Nicot brought the plant to the attention of classifying scientists, who attached the diplomat’s name to the poisonous alkaloid that humans had bent to their use. By the early 1600s, cultivated varieties of Nicotiana tabacum were being grown on a commercial scale in Brazil, Jamaica, and Virginia. The wide leaves were air-cured, then spun into rolls called carrots, or formed into the wrapped loops known as twist.
As explorers and fur traders worked their way across the interior of North America, they carried manufactured tobacco for their own use, and soon discovered that a few inches of twist served as a salve to grease civil transactions with the tribes they met, many of whom already had long-established rituals of smoking.
In the summer of 1787, naturalist Archibald Menzies stepped ashore on the Queen Charlotte Islands and collected samples of a peculiar tobacco plant that was being cultivated in the garden of a Haida man. Menzies pressed his botanical specimen and sailed away, leaving it to two American sailors to document a practice among the Haida and their Tlingit neighbors of pounding green tobacco leaves together with limestone, then placing quids of this mixture “as big as a hen’s egg” into their mouths. One of the Americans described a fine meadow covered with white and red clover, wild celery, and some tobacco plants; the other collected seeds to send to a friend. Neither suspected that the Queen Charlottes lay hundreds of miles north of any known range for wild tobacco.
During his initial survey of the lower Columbia River in 1792, Lieutenant William Broughton noted that the tribes there smoked an herb that grew in the area through long-stemmed pipes that featured carved wooden bowls attached to elderberry tubes, often two feet in length. A crew member commented that a family shared one pipe, each person taking a hearty suck and then swallowing the smoke. Broughton distributed some of his imported tobacco, “which seemed to give the people much pleasure.”
A few months later, a group of Kootenai Indians from the opposite end of the Columbia became the first known members of a Plateau tribe to share a pipe with a white man when they journeyed east across the Rockies to trade horses with the Piegan Blackfeet. Traveling with the Blackfeet was Peter Fidler, a Hudson’s Bay Company agent who recorded the encounter in great detail in his journal. The parley between the Kootenais and the Blackfeet began with an introductory smoke that lasted three-quarters of an hour. After bartering a few horses and skins, the Kootenai chief lit a pipe and made a speech in his own tongue, of which Fidler could not understand a single word. The Kootenai then took four whiffs of the pipe and handed it to Fidler, who was smoking away at his ease when the chief retrieved the pipe, indicating by signs that four whiffs was the proper number to take upon significant occasions such as making peace, or meeting friends and strangers.
When that pipe was exhausted, the chief refilled it with “his tobacco, all of their own Growing.” He presented it to Fidler and signaled that the furman should now demonstrate the white people’s manner of greeting and smoking. Fidler obligingly “made several curious motions with it that they could not comprehend or myself either.” But he maintained his composure, took three hearty whiffs, and passed the pipe to the next person in the circle, at which point “every one gave a great ho three times and the people appeared to be highly pleased at my dexterity with the pipe.”
Thirteen years later, on the cusp of the Continental Divide, Meriwether Lewis also received a lesson in smoking customs when he sat down with a group of Lemhi River Shoshones, all of whom removed their moccasins before partaking of the first pipe presented by the American. The practice symbolized a gesture of goodwill that Lewis interpreted as an offer to go barefoot if their sincerity was in doubt. Having frequently complained about the barbed spines of the local prickly pear cactus, the captain considered this “a pretty heavy penalty if they are to march through the plains of their country.”
After their initial smoke, the party moved to an encampment just west of the Divide near modern Tendoy, Idaho. There the captain and his three companions were ushered into a small lodge and seated on green boughs and antelope skins. One of the Shoshones pulled grass from a circular area in the center of the lodge and lit a fire. Their headman, Cameahwait, produced a small needle-stemmed pipe and filled the bowl with some of his own tobacco. After a brief delay while the Americans were reminded to remove their footwear, Cameahwait “lit his pipe at the fire kindled in the little magic circle … and uttered a speech of several minutes in length.” He offered his pipe to the four cardinal points, made as if to hand it to Lewis, then pulled it back and repeated the ceremony before passing it to the captain for his ritual puffs. “On these occasions,” Lewis commented, “points of etiquet are quite as much attended to by the Indians as among scivilized nations.”
As an amateur botanist who had grown up on a farm that raised commercial tobacco, Lewis regarded Cameahwait’s herb with great interest. He wrote that the Shoshone plant appeared to be identical to a sample he had collected the previous fall from an Arikara garden on the Missouri River. He learned that the Lemhi River band did not cultivate the plant themselves, but obtained it from the Crow Indians east of the Rockies and from other Shoshone bands who lived farther south. A careful drawing of Cameahwait’s needle pipe in Lewis’s journal depicts a beautiful, compact piece of functional sculpture fashioned from green stone found on the east side of the Continental Divide. The Shoshone chief gifted the pipe to Lewis, along with his own name, which he said meant “Come & Smoke.”
After parting from Cameahwait and struggling through the Bitterroots, the Americans met a band of Flathead people. According to Flathead oral tradition, the tribe welcomed the visitors by offering some of their own tobacco, but as soon as the newcomers tried to smoke, they pronounced the Indian tobacco “no good.” Lewis and Clark then cut some of their Virginia tobacco and gave it to the Flatheads, “but it was too much for them, who had never tried the American weed, and all began to cough, with great delight to the party.” Finally the captains called for some kinnikinnick—a trailing perennial whose small leathery leaves were smoked by many tribes—to mix with their trade tobacco; this the Flatheads found acceptable.
As the Corps made its way down the Columbia, William Clark noted that among the people living downstream from the mouth of the Snake “smoking is by no means so habitual tho’ still used in their councils.” Beyond the great trading center of the Dalles, however, the practice became much more common, and around the mouth of the river the herb was in great demand. Clark reckoned that blue trade beads were the gold standard there, and white beads were as valuable as silver, while tobacco held a middle rank between them. “The tobacco most admired,” he added, “is our tobacco.”
In mid-December 1805, Clark exchanged a few fishing hooks and a small sack of Cameahwait’s tobacco with some Clatsop men for wapato roots and an otter skin. At the turn of the new year, a group of Skillutes from upriver swapped him some more roots and a neat little rush bag that contained three pipes of their own tobacco. After sampling the new blend, Clark remarked that it was very similar to that of the Shoshones. Less than two weeks later, upon meeting with a Cathlamet band, the smoke blew both ways: Lewis traded some cordage and a plug of his twist for some “indian tobacco” and another basket of wapato. Lewis also recorded the same curious method of inhaling observed by William Broughton. The smokers would swallow several long drafts, holding the smoke in their lungs “until they become suffused with this vapour.” Lewis perceived this progressive inhaling, which induced spasms of belching and farting among its adherents, to be much more intoxicating than the usual method of smoking.
CLOSE ON THE HEELS OF LEWIS AND CLARK, Canadian explorer David Thompson crossed the Rockies and began his extensive survey of the Columbia and its upper tributaries. In the spring of 1808, canoeing south on the Kootenai River near the forty-ninth parallel, he peered through his telescope at beautiful meadows and grass-covered hills. “This is the place where the Indians speak so much of growing their tobacco; and we named them on that account, ‘The Tobacco Meadows.’ ” Three days later, he picked up two small turtle shells near the plantings and wondered if they had been used for dipping water. A rich body of tribal lore confirms the importance of these meadows, now known as Tobacco Plains.
Over the next three years, as Thompson established a circle of trade that covered the Inland Northwest, he passed by the Tobacco Plains several times with no further mention of either the herb or its cultivation. Then in July 1811, two days after launching a canoe from Kettle Falls for his run to the Pacific, he stopped at a Salish encampment near the mouth of the Nespelem River. During the course of a rainy day and a long portage, Thompson shared five feet of trade tobacco with the people there before pleading that his stock was depleted. The Nespelems told him that “they now intend to pull up a little of their own tobacco for smoking, though not yet ripe.” But Thompson was in a hurry, and without waiting to sample the local weed, he stepped back into his canoe to paddle away.
For the remainder of his trip to the mouth of the Columbia, Thompson made a point of stopping to smoke with every band he passed, carefully noting the details of their various ceremonies. Among the Methow people he observed that the women were allowed to join in the smoking, though they “were permitted no more than a single whiff of the Calumet, whilst the men took from 3 to 6 whiffs.” Near the mouth of the Wenatchee River, “a very respectable old man sat down by me thankful to see us and smoke our tobacco before he died.” At Priest Rapids, as a line of dancing women steadily advanced on the furmen, “all the time the men smoked, & like the rest something of a religious nature.” When he reached the mouth of the Snake River and was shown peace medals that Lewis and Clark had handed out on their earlier journey, Thompson cut off two feet of trade tobacco for a headman, and calculated that since the previous evening he had smoked and given away a full two and a quarter fathoms (almost fourteen feet).
When North West Company clerk Alexander Ross stopped at the great summer gathering at the Dalles fishery in 1812, he saw people from the interior bartering homegrown tobacco along with horses and buffalo robes for dentalia shells and other items from the coast. Around the same time, a clerk at Astoria heard about tribal tobacco grown both up the Willamette drainage and at the Tobacco Plains on the Kootenai River.
In 1819, after spending a season in the Snake River country, trader Donald McKenzie reported that some of the Shoshone bands he met there preferred their own tobacco to the company brand. In trade, the Shoshones also held their herb in high esteem: While willingly exchanging a beaver pelt for a small pocket mirror worth twopence, they demanded an ax worth four or five shillings for a pint of their tobacco. McKenzie described the wild tobacco as a short plant of a brownish color that sprouted in the sandy, barren soil of their country. To prepare the leaves for smoking, the Shoshones rubbed them between their hands or pounded them with stones until they reached the consistency of green tea. Even though weaker in strength, he considered the native version a good substitute for manufactured tobacco, with the same “aromatic flavour and narcotic effect,” although it did leave a certain green taste in his mouth.
McKenzie also delved into the lore surrounding tobacco among the Snake River Shoshones:
There is a fabulous story current among these people, and universally believed, that they were the first smokers of tobacco on the earth! That they have been in the habit of using it from one generation to another since the world began. That all other Indians learned to smoke and had their tobacco first from them. That the white people’s tobacco is only good for the whites: and that if they would give the preference to the white people’s tobacco and give up smoking their own it would then cease to grow on their lands and instead, a deleterious weed would grow up in its place and poison them all.
Shortly after David Douglas arrived at Fort Vancouver in 1825, he learned that some of the tribes on the lower Columbia were cultivating tobacco, and he began a quest to track it down. Douglas thought he had succeeded when he saw a native at the Dalles with a tobacco plant in his hand, but the man refused to give up his prize for scientific inspection; even when the botanist offered him a plug of manufactured tobacco in exchange, “he would on no consideration part with it.”
A couple of months later, while botanizing along the lower Willamette River, Douglas stumbled onto a “little plantation” where the herb was growing. Without hesitation, he clipped some specimens and headed back to his camp. On the way he met the owner, who recognized the source of Douglas’s sample and was visibly displeased. But when Douglas offered two finger-lengths of his trade tobacco, the man became more friendly and was soon talking about his plants. His people did not cultivate their tobacco near camps or lodges, he said, “lest it should be taken for use before maturity. An open place in the wood is chosen where there is dead wood, which they burn, and sow the seed in the ashes.… He told me that wood ashes made it grow very large.” Douglas was very taken with the idea of using wood ashes to feed the soil, and he offered his informant another finger-length of manufactured tobacco. “When we smoked,” the naturalist concluded, “we were all in all.”
On a later collecting trip near the mouth of the Columbia, Douglas’s Chinook guide brought along a personal stash of tobacco. With each succeeding rest stop along their journey, Douglas grew increasingly amazed at the amount and intensity of the man’s smoking. When the botanist was forward enough to tease him about it, the guide offered him a pipe. “In self-defense I was obliged to smoke, when I found that my mode of using the Indian weed diverted my companion as much as his had me. ‘Oh,’ cried he, ‘why do you throw away the food? (smoke). See, I take it in my belly.’ ” Douglas, coughing helplessly, sucked in a food grown by a people who tended no other crops.
Taken together, these early accounts provide a rough picture of tribal tobacco cultivation across the Columbia country, from the Kootenai River to the Snake and from the mid-Columbia to the mouth. It is also clear that there was an active trade in the herb back and forth across the Rockies and up and down the Columbia. But little is known about the identity of the plants being cultivated.
The tattered leaves and withered flowers of the plant that David Douglas pilfered from the garden on the Willamette are the only preserved specimens of tobacco gathered from the Columbia drainage anywhere near the time of contact. Botanists have identified his pressed plant as a variety of Nicotiana quadrivalvis, commonly known as Indian tobacco. A large-flowered, vigorous shrub with long, tubular, white blossoms, Indian tobacco is not native to the Northwest; its natural habitat is centered along the Pacific slopes of California. Through trade and cultivation, native peoples extended its range far to the north and east. Along its journey, the ancestral species developed many varieties, with slight differences in appearance or taste that were clearly recognized by the tribes. The specimens gathered by Archibald Menzies on the Queen Charlottes in 1787, Meriwether Lewis from the Arikara village in 1804, and David Douglas on the lower Columbia in 1826—as well as samples taken from Crow tobacco gardens in Montana later in the nineteenth century—are all currently recognized as cultivars of Nicotiana quadrivalvis.
From the samples of Indian tobacco gathered along the Columbia and Missouri Rivers, it seems logical to conclude that this was the herb being used throughout the Columbia drainage. But there is another species of tobacco in the intermountain West, and this one is indigenous to the region. Coyote tobacco (Nicotiana attenuata) is a smaller-leafed, scrubbier plant than Indian tobacco; the tubes and petals on its cream-colored flowers are noticeably shorter. The natural range of coyote tobacco spreads north from the Mexican highlands through the Great Basin, then gradually diminishes as it laps over the Continental Divide and up through the Columbia Plateau.
How widely coyote tobacco was used by people in the Columbia drainage remains unclear. It might be the same herb that figures in a Wishram myth in which Coyote creates people from the scrapings of his tobacco pipe. Ethnographic accounts gathered from Sahaptin and Interior Salish peoples describe all manner of medicinal treatments and ceremonial uses, varying from band to band. Coyote tobacco was used to soothe itchy scalps, cuts and sores, eczema and hives; mixed with bear fat, it made a balm for burns. Chewed leaves relieved toothaches, breathed smoke opened up clogged nasal passages, and a weak suffusion helped expel worms. A strong suffusion of the plant’s green leaves made a powerful emetic.
Some groups told early anthropologists that they harvested coyote tobacco opportunistically, while others recalled traditional gathering sites visited from year to year. Coyote tobacco, tough enough to survive in the volcanic scablands of the interior, would appear to be the plant that Donald McKenzie described growing spontaneously in the Snake River country. A few ethnographers have speculated that coyote tobacco was the species being grown on the Nespelem River and at Tobacco Plains. Others disagree, citing the extensive trade networks that would have distributed the larger, more smokable leaves of Indian tobacco. Given the information available, it is impossible to say whether any particular tribe was growing Indian tobacco, coyote tobacco, or both. It is hard to draw a line between a plant that grows spontaneously and one that is consciously gardened; between a knowledge of what the land produces and the forethought of cultivation and harvest.
LIEUTENANT WILLIAM BROUGHTON, remarking on the fondness of Chinooks for tobacco in 1792, suggested that “it might become a valuable article of traffic amongst them.” Subsequent sea captains obviously shared his opinion, for when Lewis and Clark wintered at Fort Clatsop in 1805, they reported tobacco as one of the items that Indians on the lower river were obtaining from visiting ships. When fur posts were established along the length of the river, manufactured tobacco became one of their most important imports. The ceremony of smoking continued to be a necessary prelude to conducting business, and traders journeying about the country made sure to stop at any camp they passed for a “friendly calumet,” for to omit this tribute was considered an insult according to the customs of the Columbia. Agents unrolled carrots of leaf tobacco as rewards for good behavior and used the promise of tobacco to influence diplomacy between tribes. When competition heated up between rival fur companies, one trader scheduled a “grand smoking match” to lure customers to his post.
In addition to its importance in the social scheme, tobacco also became a significant element in the regional economy. There had been a lively trade in native tobacco long before the arrival of white men, but those transactions had been measured in pipes; now bales of “the much-loved weed” arrived by ship and canoe. Traders purchased salmon and sturgeon, deer and elk, canoes and timber for varying lengths of twist. They paid young men a few handfuls of leaf tobacco to lug supplies and boats around portages. David Douglas considered tobacco “the currency of the country” and used it to hire guides and rent horses. Other naturalists exchanged plugs of tobacco for live birds, young wolves, and a great variety of other specimens.
The example of the white men, many of whom had a perpetual pipe in their mouths, coupled with the relative abundance of a commodity that had been previously scarce, changed the role of tobacco in native life. Gradually the habit of smoking overlaid the ancestral ritual of smoke. Many came to regard “the envied plant” as a necessity for everyday life in addition to a sacrament for ceremonial occasions. Travelers at the Dalles were greeted by men begging for “pi-pi,” and tribes in the interior grew resentful if supplies at the fur posts ran low. When trader Ross Cox arrived at Spokane House in the summer of 1813 after an absence of several months, a large crowd gathered, and the Spokane chief delivered an oration:
My heart is glad to see you.… We were a long time very hungry for tobacco; and some of our young men said you would never come back. They were angry, and said, “The white men made us love tobacco … and now we are starving for it.”
Touring the Columbia region in 1835, missionary Samuel Parker was impressed with the ways in which the tribes mixed a small amount of tobacco with other herbs so as to conserve their supply, and he admired their dignified manner of sharing a pipe while discussing business or telling stories. But as time went by, he became disheartened at the effects of the “stupefying vegetable” on the culture, and decided that it was far too expensive an indulgence, a vice from which they should be rescued.
As manufactured tobacco flooded into the region, traditional garden plots began to fade from view. By 1829, when questioned about tribal horticulture, Hudson’s Bay Company agent John Work reported from Fort Colvile: “The only instance of agriculture I have heard of in the district is among the Kootenais where, with great ceremony, a small quantity of a kind of tobacco is sowed.” After the time of Work’s report, evidence of tribal tobacco cultivation is extremely hard to come by. Systematic botanical exploration around the Northwest in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries failed to turn up any Indian tobacco at all. When anthropologist A. F. Chamberlain constructed a list of plants used by the Kootenais in the 1890s, the entry for Nicotiana was followed by a conspicuous blank. By 1912 collector William Cusick was convinced that the plant once traded from the Continental Divide to the Pacific was “not to be found in the Columbia River Basin region.” Apparently this cultivar was not hardy enough to naturalize itself so far north, and soon after people stopped saving the seed and replanting it in the spring, it faded away. Those tribal people who wished to carry on the tradition did so in plots that they did not show to visitors from outside the tribe.
Even as Indian tobacco disappeared from sight, the indigenous coyote tobacco persisted around the tributaries of the mid-Columbia. Between 1890 and the 1930s, botanists collected specimens from the lower Snake River and the Columbia’s Big Bend; along the lines of Wilson and Crab Creeks in the heart of the Basin; from the San Poil and Nespelem Rivers; and up the Okanogan into British Columbia. Some seeds floated far downstream; during World War I, a researcher plucked several sprawling specimens of coyote tobacco from sandbars in the river between Portland and old Fort Vancouver. The era of dam building drowned many of these collecting sites, and modern disturbances have altered much of the habitat where coyote tobacco might have grown. Current botanists maintain that coyote tobacco in the Columbia Plateau has always been an ephemeral plant, with no specific habitat keys and no guarantee that a healthy patch will reappear in the same spot from one year to the next. It is a hard flower to pin down.
If you follow the Kootenai River upstream past Tobacco Plains and into British Columbia, it veers east around a bold nose of rock, leaving a short portage to Columbia Lake. There, with formidable mountains rising on either side, the mother river begins in a shallow marsh. It is a quiet place laid upon geological turmoil, a warm pocket surrounded by long winters, a place where wet and dry habitats bump into one another. As I scrambled around the lake’s roadless side, I touched both arid rubber rabbitbrush and a delicate cliff brake fern. Junipers crept beneath Douglas firs that looked as if they belonged in a rain forest. Above a metamorphic outcrop, I ate dust along a weedy trail that suddenly gave way to rills of clear liquid hissing from the hillside. It looked like the kind of landscape that might be the birthplace of both a great river and a special plant. Kootenai lore specifies this area as the source of their original tobacco seed, but there were no plants to be found in the places I looked, and the longer I gazed across the vast expanse of mountain and wetland encompassed by the Rocky Mountain Trench, the more I realized I was going to need some help to find them.
At a tribal dinner north of the international border, a friend introduced me to a Kootenai elder as the man who might set me straight. He was a small, wiry figure with perfect posture who displayed a Veterans of Foreign Wars pin in his neatly shaped hat. As I rattled on about David Thompson’s tortoiseshell dippers and the two kinds of tobacco I had been researching, his face revealed nothing. When I wondered if he, or anyone he knew, might want to go looking for the plants, he waved me silent with a slight turn of his hat. His voice was extremely quiet; he spoke very slowly, so that I could understand every word. But the meaning of those words floated past me until some time later, when I was tracing the Kootenai River back through its corner of Montana.
I had stopped beside the highway to look at a couple of large rocks that were covered with artwork and caged by steel bars to prevent vandalism. Among the figures were a pair of identical buffalo, executed with amazing precision. One stood right side up, the other upside down, and each animal displayed wonderful curved hooves. On one of the steel bars in front of the buffalo, just above the ground, someone had tied a strip of red cloth. Inside the bars, perched on fresh dirt, lay a broken Camel cigarette. This pair of traditional offerings might be seen at tribal sites across North America, and I wondered what place a wild plant could hope to hold in the face of such machine-rolled abundance. Staring at the brown flakes of tobacco spilling from the torn wrapper, I heard the words of the Kootenai elder as if for the first time.
“What you don’t understand yet,” he had said. “What you might never understand is that this is more than tobacco we’re talking about here. This is us. And I don’t believe you’ll be able to tear the two of us apart.”
When I had opened my mouth to reply, he silenced me with another twist of his hat. “Let it go,” he said. “We say let it go.”
WHEN I RETURNED TO THE MID-COLUMBIA, I didn’t feel the need to pry into anyone’s private rituals; I simply wanted to see if I could find coyote tobacco growing in the wild. By visiting herbariums around the region and poring through early anthropology reports, I made a list of historic collection sites and began visiting them opportunistically, bouncing from a landfill at Boardman to a manicured lawn at the old Almota ferry landing on the Snake, from a corral on Wilson Creek to a poison ivy paradise in the Ginkgo National Monument. I homed in on year-round springs, oases that produced odd bird sightings, and little buttes that looked like pleasant campgrounds. More and more, I noticed that the old coyote tobacco sites coincided with slight wrinkles in topography. Whenever I arrived at the kind of terrain that held promise, I would trudge contentedly for mile after mile without ever seeing anything like the plant I was after.
One August afternoon I found myself walking the reaches of a wide coulee near the western limits of the Columbia Basin. Even though the sun had tipped well past its midday height, the air temperature still hung around a hundred degrees, and I had trouble synchronizing my feet as I cut across windrows in a freshly cut wheat field. “Watch your step,” the rancher who had given me permission to explore his land had cautioned. “Bull snakes tend to lay out beside the piles, but rattlers like to crawl up into the straw.”
I made for the inviting coolness of a heavy-lidded depression in the entablature of dark basalt. As soon as I stepped into the shade of the uplift, I could see the entrance to a deep cave that had been hidden from sight by a mound of loose dirt. An arch of finely crystallized pillow basalt formed the portal, its top rim decorated with withered cliff brake fern.
Inside, the cave opened into a dramatic chamber. Enough light shone through the entrance for me to see that the ceiling was black, perhaps from smoke, with patches of white showing through here and there. Beyond a shelf of clean basalt, a smaller arch opened into a tunnel that was plugged with dirt and rocks. A mummified deer mouse, large body and long tail intact, lay untouched in the center of the room. News articles about cases of hantavirus had appeared in the papers over the past week, and I wondered if I should tie a hankie over my mouth. But beyond that, I could not quell a rising sense that I did not belong in this cave. I dropped to all fours and scrambled over the berm, brushing the dangling ferns.
Back in the glaring sunlight, I watched a red combine follow a prancing border collie into the field and begin to chew on a last corner section of unharvested wheat. As I approached, the rancher I had spoken with earlier wrenched his machine out of gear and stepped from the elevated cab, happy to tell me what he knew about the cave.
In the 1930s, the landowner had found a bundle of sagebrush matting hidden in a crevice in one of the rock walls. He unrolled the bundle to discover a carved cedar carrying case about a foot long; inside, a beautiful stone calumet, straight with a belled end, lay in a bed of soft twisted cedar bark. The case and the pipe were both inscribed with markings reminiscent of rock art along the nearby Columbia. Some expert—the rancher could not remember exactly who—identified it as a Columbia Salish headman’s special pipe, and said elders used the cave to hide tobacco from kids who hadn’t earned the smoking privilege.
Geologists who followed the pipe-finder had been thrilled to find evidence of a secondary lava flow inside the cave. The rancher’s favorite moment came the afternoon one of the scientists announced that they had identified a sticky kind of tar on the back wall of the cave as pack rat urine. It had drizzled in from an unseen chamber, and provided the clue that led them to a hidden lava tube. “Pack rat piss,” he chortled as he swayed with his idling combine. “Can you imagine?”
The border collie jumped up to lick my hand, and I turned to scope the canyon that curled behind the headwall and the cave. When I asked about the watercourse, the rancher pointed toward the skeletal remains of a barn and a century-old walnut tree, planted by his granddad the year he built his original homestead. Rocking to the intricate rhythms and knocks of his machine, he poured his knowledge of the coulee down on me. If I caught the gully of a seasonal creek just below that walnut tree, he said, it would lead me all the way to the top of the ridge. I was welcome to walk up there and look for all the flowers I wanted. In fact, I should keep an eye out for a spring box at the far end of the property—the outlet pipe was always getting plugged, and he would appreciate it if I scraped the weeds off the screen on my way past. That sounded like a deal to me.
“The water up there might look good,” he warned me as I departed. “But don’t drink too much of it. We don’t want to be hauling you out of the canyon on a rack.”
The heat had finally begun to ease by the time I started up the draw. The past spring’s heavy runoff, its path clearly marked by a white band of alkali, had carved deep channels through the sandbars. Falling into my familiar search pattern, I zigged this way and that, working slowly up the braids. A battered irrigation pipe ran down the high side of the watercourse, established long enough ago that clumps of serviceberry and mock orange had sprouted beside dependable leaks. A yellow-breasted chat, its face masked like an outlaw, chortled at me from the shadows. I laughed back, then stopped to admire a pale evening primrose, still blooming after all the other wildflowers had withered in the sun.
My first rooted-in-the-earth coyote tobacco plant appeared near the top of the alkali band edging one of the sandbars. In a landscape of washed-out weeds and pastel primroses, its greenery flashed like a sunning reptile. Every surface of the plant was covered with a golden fuzz, those infamous glands of nicotine. The entire specimen measured a modest twenty inches tall, but on the hottest day of the summer it still managed to sport sixteen fresh blossoms, each one a creamy trumpet not much more than an inch long. Ten more had recently faded, but the tobacco had not yet set any of its distinctive seed pods.
I had circled the plant twice, fully satisfied with the wonder of finally finding one, when I stumbled upon another. It was puny compared with the first, a single unbranched stem with only a couple of new blossoms to show off. This tobacco sprouted from the creek bed proper, a place that on several occasions during the winter and spring must have run hard with water. But the runt showed me something that its sister plant lacked: a dozen fully ripe seed capsules, some of them already cracked open and shedding their tiny seeds. In my hand they looked like the yellow-brown nits combed out on lice days at elementary school.
Still working my way upstream, I found a total of six plants within fifty yards. The largest one was a healthy bush more than two feet tall with three dozen blooms and two dozen faded flowers. At the base of its many stems, several brown crinkled leaves represented the cured remains of the plant’s first burst above ground. Crushed in my hand, they exuded the scent of air-cured tobacco.
Shadows were climbing the canyon wall by the time I returned to the main coulee. With night coming on, the wind began to flow easily down the canyon, repaying the thermal debt of the morning and freshening my dusty mouth. I relocated my first clump of coyote tobacco and sat down to wait for darkness, scratching figures in the sand and thinking about how water coursing from the canyon spring, boosted each year by bursts of spring runoff, must have provided enough moisture to sprout a few seeds in the gravel year after year.
Venus peeked over the east rim of the palisade, chased by the light of a waning moon. I leaned down every few minutes to drag my nose across the small blossoms of the coyote tobacco. Before the moon caught up with Venus, a faint scent of honey seemed to drip from one white trumpet, then dissipate in the night air. I thought I must have imagined it, and dipped my nose to the flower once more. No matter how close I twisted my face, I couldn’t catch the smell again.